Contagion

You might look differently at the woman coughing next to you or the man who doesn’t wash his hands in the restroom after seeing Contagion, a taut medical drama that could be the worst nightmare for germophobes and hypochondriacs.

If that’s the case, it’s a compliment to the latest effort from the versatile Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), which succeeds in the way it preys on public fears with its depiction of a global disease running rampant.

Choose your real-life parallel from a batch that includes SARS, bird flu, swine flu or others. The film isn’t based directly on any of them. Yet it captures the effects of a dangerous airborne pandemic on a culture that feeds on rumors, when the fearful curiosity of average people evolves into full-blown paranoia.

Although it takes place in several cities around the world, the story centers on a Minnesota man (Matt Damon) whose wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) dies suddenly after contracting flu symptoms following a business trip to Hong Kong. Soon afterward, more people start dying, and international disease experts don’t have any answers. It isn’t long before various cities are subject to mass quarantines, food rationing and widespread looting as government officials become desperate for answers.

The first-rate ensemble cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Bryan Cranston among the doctors scrambling to find a vaccine — and a distribution method that won’t cause chaos.

Soderbergh ratchets up the tension with his close-up shots of doorknobs, elevator buttons, public bus poles, and other potential virus-spreading items that are touched every day.

The focus of the screenplay by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) is confined primarily to the individual stories of doctors and patients, and the exasperation each side collectively faces while dealing with a ticking clock and plenty of bureaucratic red tape.

Other broader angles aren’t explored as much in as much depth, such as global politics, economic ramifications and media coverage. Yet there is a choice line fired off by a research doctor (Elliott Gould) to a pesky blogger (Jude Law) trying to gain fame from his coverage of the crisis: “Blogging isn’t writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”

At any rate, there’s a slickness to the structure of the film that prevents a sense of hopelessness, which works against it. But this is a potent and provocative story of a fictional epidemic that resonates with contemporary relevance.

Rated PG-13, 106 minutes.